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Square Enix Q&A Session Report

To clarify announcements made yesterday at Square Enix's press conference, today the company held a Question and Answer session, headed by company president Yoichi Wada and marketing executive Shinji Hashimoto, dived deeper into the games shown (and not shown) at yesterday's press conference, as well as the revelations and demos that came out of Sony and Microsoft's pressers. Though many of the answers were evasive, a deeper understanding of the company's strategies going into the next generation became clear.

The Japanese press seemed particularly shocked by the company's decision to bring Final Fantasy XI to the Xbox 360. While this move was unexpected to the Western press, Japanese editors seemed very keen to discover what this would bode for future multiplatform developments. Of course, the company is currently espousing a philosophy for development of all platforms and media, so that was pretty much the answer given at all times.

The session began, expectedly, with a question about the development of Final Fantasy XI for Xbox 360. According to Wada, the game will be ready for the system's launch. Development has been progressing smoothly. There will be no fundamental changes to the game over the PC and PS2 versions -- they want to present the same world and game concept to Xbox 360 gamers. Also, as the game has to be cross compatible with the PC and PS2 versions, they do not intend to make any significant changes that might create incompatibility issues. They will continue to release "discs" (presumably Wada meant expansion packs) to add new content to all versions of FFXI.

Further development for the 360 is under consideration but no titles can be named at this time. Wada did mention that the company would like to continue to explore the system and be more comprehensive than simply offering a port of an older, if still actively popular, game to the system. Continuing in this vein, Wada explained that FFXI would be ported to other platforms in the future if they could support the game and had an interested user base.

The enigmatic The World of Mana came up next. Yesterday, this latest installment in the Mana series was revealed with absolutely nothing but a short teaser trailer: platform, release date, and even what it is, were not revealed. It's an example of Square Enix's new philosophy of "polymorphic content", or fully realized worlds that could be used for a variety of media such as games, books, anime, and cell phone content. Wada reiterated that The World of Mana is not ready to be further revealed, in either release timing or platform -- or even in fact what form of media it would even take. It's still under planning.

Next up was a question about the mysterious Final Fantasy XII, which is not showing on the E3 floor despite being fully playable last year. Wada assured us that it's just due to the tight development schedule and that the timing wasn't right to show it again. The company plans to showcase the game at a special show in Japan from July 30-31.